We could have been legendary lovers
Sing clingy caught between the earth and the sea!

She sings tingling clinging to te-titty.
Rap turn a wrap clap trap you know how it feels—
Legendary lovers ever living real for it is we!

I love you, all you that I loved before,
adrift with me here with thee
And more by the sandy shore…candy store.

What sort of difference would it make?
Afloat up in a sea no key aqui she clings tenaciously for teatitty sufficiently
Who knows—
What sort of difference would it make—
What chance circumstance she dance a trance romance she drove to the shore—
Afloat in a sea…aqui…

This is old. 25-plus years old. I remember singing this reggae to myself as I drove home from school, down 101 to Carr’s Store, where you turn onto 137 to go to Hancock. This was the earliest portion of the original Roadside Truckstop to come into being. Here you go. I love you.

Living in the concrete jungle
Where life is a constant struggle
Living from day to day
It all ends the same anyway
If life is too big a load,
Go to the end of the road.
Go to the elephant graveyard
You know we all end up there someday.

You know we all got our own path,
And life moves too fast.
If a little good comes your way
You know it’s too good to last.
If the road is too rough a ride
Go to the truckstop by the roadside
Go to the elephant graveyard
You know we all end up there someday.

(spoken)
Well it’s just my opinion,
And this is my final refrain,
That it don’t take a genius
To figure out life is pain.
I tell you there’s a better way
Than to weep on the shards of a bad day.
But if you need some way
To follow the sunset someday
Go to the roadside truckstop
Or stop in there one day.

Some kind of dystopic stuff is afoot from Tom Wheeler and the FCC. I mean hilariously awful. A lot of people are writing Tom.Wheeler@fcc.gov and openinternet@fcc.gov to let their feelings be known. I figured I’d tap something together and hopefully make a new buddy while I’m at it! Neat huh?

Mr. Wheeler:

You must be an intelligent, thoughtful man. You were certainly smart enough to leverage your relationship with companies like Comcast and Verizon into getting the Chairman’s seat at the Federal Communications Commission. Bravo sir. I too aspired to civil service. Good gigs, usually.

Now the agency for which you work is chartered to “regulate…interstate and international communications by radio, television, wire, satellite and cable in all 50 states, the District of Columbia and U.S. territories.” says so on fcc.gov. That’s your mandate.

Your proposition for “net neutrality” does not follow that mandate. Not even a little.

It will allow a cadre of massive companies–like Comcast and Verizon–to do the regulating for you by essentially selling their services–high-speed internet access–to the highest bidder. Only those that will be able to pay their outrageous levies will be able to get their content to end-users.

And this will be the most beige dreck there is. The most inoffensive, mediocre pap that companies like Disney and Fox can shovel out there in the name of capitalism.

But wait! There’s more!

Because we at the other end of the wire are also paying outrageous levies to use these services, you are allowing these massive companies to essentially “double-dip” for the same lousy service.

So we’re paying, they’re paying too. My, but they must all *love* you now, your former clients. You’re going to make them obscenely rich–richer than they already are, which is perhaps the greatest obscenity of all.

That might actually be your goal here. It sure looks like it.

And by the way, *none* of these companies are investing in infrastructure improvements, or in increasing broadband speed and reliability. Not at all. There are actual third-world countries with faster throughput than we have in the United States, and are getting it for less money.

Tom, that’s just embarrassing. I can call you Tom, right? You’ve read this far after all, we’re almost buddies now!

Anyway, these companies are essentially a cartel, cornering a market and using their money and influence–influence you helped them get–to stifle innovation. If a town wants to set up a public broadband utility, for example, these companies buy the votes and the lawyers necessary to squelch that so they can continue to offer their crappy overpriced service.

You’d know that of course, That was your old gig. Helping your pals at Comcast and Verizon (and AT&T,etc.) keep making their money while offering nothing in return but their monopoly.

If your intention was to con your way into this public office for the purpose of making companies like Verizon and Comcast disgustingly rich at the expense of the American people, then you’re doing a fabulous job by the way. Kudos.

I’m not saying it *was* your intention, but it sure *looks* that way from here Tom.

Real Net Neutrality means that these companies get regulated like electric and gas and water utilities–actual public utilities working in the actual public interest. Because only in that way can “an appropriate competitive framework for the unfolding of the communications revolution” (from your site again!) actually exist.

Here’s the thing Tom. You know you’ve stepped in some poo, right? This is just uncool. But you can do the right thing here. You can actually defend Net Neutrality and let real innovation and real competition happen.

Because if you let your old pals have their way Tom, then you are *not* actually working in the public interest. You will be working *against* the wishes and needs of your real bosses, the American people, in favor of money-grubbing corporations who are anti-freedom, anti-creativity, anti-competition and, thus, anti-American.

You will have violated your agency’s charter. You will be removed from your job sir. We will petition, and protest, and do all that is necessary to have you removed from that comfy chair.

But you, me, we’re all cool people right? It doesn’t have to get ugly does it?

You’ve got the opportunity to be kind of a hero here. You have the opportunity to let the future actually happen. Support real, actual Net Neutrality. Be brave.

Okay. what am I getting at here? Besides the fact that this keyboard is not conducive to typing.

I, John Grow, born in 1968 and currently returning to type this sentence after admiring the ass of a passing woman in a pair of lovely boots, do not believe in the god of the Abrahamic religions. This to me is a “no-brainer.”

The god of the bible (whatever that entity is–even the books that make up the bible are inconsistent on that score) is a work of fiction. Whether it was earnestly generated from the worldview of the writers of the various books or whether it was cynically constructed by those same men for population control and tribal identity, it is a work of fiction.

You, whomever you are, if you are “a believer,” you hold in your head a certain construct that you call “god.” Or “Jesus.” Or “Allah.” Or even “Buddha,” if you really didn’t pay attention to what buddhism is about.

This mental construct is what you refer to when you speak of god or Jesus or the others. I don’t know if I need to spell this out further to you, but if you really were paying attention to what and how you learned, it should have been plain that your version of Jesus, let’s say, and someone else’s, are as different as the minds that hold them. Even if you both had the same classes in school, your conclusions are affected by your history and environment to that point, and the perceptions which have evolved from that.

tl;dr: Your Jesus is *your* Jesus, not someone else’s. You merely agree for the sake of argument you’re talking about the same thing.

There is a term called “consensual reality” that I first read in my Zen days. Basically, reality is what we agree it is among ourselves overtly or tacitly, hence “consensual.”

So when you all talk about your god or your Jesus or your allah, you need to consider whether you speak of your own concept or the one you tacitly agreed to by joining whatever fan club you belong to.

This is one of the things that go into what I mean when I call myself “atheist.” In my worldview, this also means I don’t believe in a heaven or a hell or a soul, though I have experienced both heaven and hell in my own life. I also use all three terms–”heaven,” “hell,” and “soul,” as shorthand for bigger, harder-to-wield concepts.

I used to do the same thing with “god.” The concept I proxy with that word is closer to Einstein’s or Spinoza’s concepts than to the Abrahamic one.

In the end, they are still mental constructs. Everything is, and nothing is (hello Meher Baba).

We exist in a matrix of constructs of our own creation. Somebody else made the Valentines Day cards in the rack in front of me, as well as the wire rack itself, the paper and the ink, the paint, the steel in the wire. But the concepts behind them are just things some group of somebodys came up with at various points in linear time.

The wan loneliness I feel at not having a sweetie to give one of those cards to is also a construct. One of ego and longing and the soupy mess those have made in my life since at least puberty.

Truth is as slippery and illusory as any other mental construct. I’d go so far as to state that truth-seeking is nothing more than a search for validation of the concepts one already holds.

This is especially true if you’re not honest about the most central and basic illusion of them all: Yourself.